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Comment by czhu12 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve launched apps with free trials in the past and when I allowed email, there were 100 fake emails from temporary email services for every 1 real one. Had to do more work to block those as they were eating up all the resources from paying users

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If you have an extensive demo page covering my use case, I would prefer a low-cost entry offer to use my Google account. Upgrading to a more expensive option later is usually not such a hard task for me when I really love the product.

Lately, I had a case when someone informed me that he would take my e-mail from his newsletter mailing list because I seemed to be a dead address (and every address generated cost for him). I replied that I did not like to be tracked (implying that I had read the newsletter) and we had a nice conversation. Not every fake e-mail is as fake as it seems ;-)

Apparently, Thunderbird can be quite good at beating E-Mail Tracking.

Doesn't this just further the point that your potential customers don't want to identify themselves to try your product? Punting on anti-sybil or anti-spam by requiring a strongly identity-linked account (Google accounts can't be created from VPNs or without phone numbers, for instance) is user-hostile.

If your free users are using up paid user resources, that's a different problem.

One of the nice parts about starting a business is that you get to choose your customers. There is no ethical or moral rule that you must provide access to everyone who wants to use your app. You are even allowed to make decisions that reduce your revenue in favor of other priorities.

The problem is not that I want peoples real information, I really couldn't care less. It's the fact that some of these are clearly the same people creating hundreds of emails to just keep resubscribing to a free trial.

I could tell because there were emails with the sequence of:

1@xyz.com 2@xyz.com ... etc

Low trust world, I guess. If I'm poking around to see whether I like something or not, no way am I giving it a real email.

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